The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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Love and Depp

by Shelley Levitt
People Magazine
October 3, 1994

No
one takes more
risks than the Gielgud of grunge. But is
this Johnny Depp’s year of living too
dangerously?

After
a hotel fracas with girlfriend Kate Moss lands Johnny Depp in jail,
the actor one friend calls “the finest human being to step on
the
earth” can’t seem to stay out of trouble.

They
are a couple of serious young
actors. It was a sensitive movie,
directed by the
renowned
Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom. So naturally the cast and crew of
last year’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
could speak
of
nothing but whether Leo DiCaprio would accept Johnny Depp’s
$500
dare and sniff a rancid pickled egg. “Finally,”
recalls Darlene
Cates, the 520-lb. actress who played Depp and DiCaprio’s
mother
in
that tale of deeply dysfunctional small-town family, “we are
sitting around a dinner table, and Leo unscrews the lid. I have got
my eyes squeezed shut, holding my nose. Then I hear this
‘aaaggghhh!’
I look up, and Leo is gagging and running out the back door.”

And
so goes, by all accounts, a typical day in the life of Johnny
Depp—no
doubt the only actor who ever asked director Hallstrom how to say,
“I
have a rat down my throat” in Swedish. Depp has said that
he’s an
“equal opportunity sniffer,” who enjoys the
“150
varieties of
smell on every movie set,” not even minding when
“the grip
stinks
like a gut wagon.” The star of TV’s 21
Jump Street
and the
movies Edward Scissorhands and Benny
& Joon has,
reportedly, whiled away at least one L.A. evening hanging by his
fingertips from a fifth-story parking garage at the Beverly Center
alongside close friend Nicolas Cage. And then there is Depp’s
Bart
Simpson-esque penchant for checking into hotels under ribald
pseudonyms. Why would a 31-one year old man tell a front-desk clerk
that he is “Mr. Donkey Penis”? Because, you see, it
makes
for
such interesting wake-up calls.

But
maybe it’s time Depp got a serious wake-up call. Friends such
as
Cates insist that “Johnny is the most gentle, sweetest soul
who
ever walked the earth,” and John Waters, who directed Depp in
1990’s Cry-Baby, says he “is
probably the best
young actor
working in America today.” Yet these days the
chain-smoking,
tattoo-festooned, Viper Room-owning movie star seems to be dancing on
the edge of danger. At 5:30 a.m. on Sept. 13, a green knit hat pulled
down over his forehead, Depp was arrested on charges
of criminal
mischief after trashing his $1200-a night room at New York
City’s
tony Mark Hotel. Police suspect he was drunk and
had been
fighting
with his girlfriend Kate Moss, 20. After several hours in a holding
cell, he was released and told that the charges would be dismissed if
he stayed out of trouble for six months and agreed to reimburse the
Mark $9,767.12 in damages and guest fees.

That
was just the most highly publicized of Depp’s recent
problems.
One
week earlier, visiting Moss in her native London, he reportedly
caused a ruckus in a pub when 27-year-old photographer Jonathan
Walpole mistakenly picked up Depp’s glass from the bar.
“He
pulled my ears very hard, “Walpole told London’s Evening
Standard, adding that “some ape” who was
with Depp
“leaped
on my back, put his arm around my neck and tried to force my head to
the floor.”

To
many of Depp’s friends these incidents are, as one put it,
“just
Johnny being Johnny,” the sort of outbursts they have come to
expect on occasion from an actor who can be as otherworldly as the
character he played in Scissorhands. “I
think Johnny
obviously has a temper, but this is a very minor incident,”
John
Waters says of the Mark melee. “The room service must have
been
bad.” However, Marlon Brando, who
befriended Depp when the two shot
the upcoming movie Don Juan DeMarco and the
Centerfold [Editor's note: the movie's name was
later
shortened]
earlier this year, was worried enough to place a phone call to
Depp’s
Lawyer David Breitbart when he heard about the arrest. “He
said
he
was very concerned about Johnny’s well-being,” says
Breitbart,
“and if there was anything he could do to help, he would like
to.”

Surely
it’s time to take stock when you’re eligible for
counseling
from
Marlon Brando. Yet Timothy Leary, the ‘60’s LSD
guru who is
the
godfather of Depp’s onetime fiancée Winona Ryder,
says
that
Depp is both “wild and charitable.” Most friends
prefer to
focus
on the charitable side, offering tales of his kindness and
generosity. Driving near the Austin, Texas, set of Grape during
a downpour, Depp came across a homeless woman; he offered her a lift
and gave her every cent he had on him. In a visit arranged by the
Make-a-Wish Foundation, he brought a terminally ill, 11-year-old girl
to the set of Ed Wood and hovered over her the
entire day. He
is said to wander, at 4 or 5 in the morning, outside the Viper Room,
the Sunset Strip club where 23-year-old River Phoenix died of an
overdose last Halloween, and hand out 50 and 100 dollar bills to the
destitute huddled on the sidewalk.

But
there is a darker side to Depp as well.
Before he left the Mark Hotel in handcuffs, he had been arrested on
three previous occasions: for getting into a tiff with an L.A. police
officer over a jaywalking ticket, for speeding in Arizona and for
assaulting a hotel security guard in Vancouver, B.C. He has engaged
since childhood in thrill-seeking escapades that seem downright
self-destructive. In a caper that even he, looking back, described as
“a really ridiculous thing,” Depp blew on fire with
a
mouthful of
gasoline. His face ignited, and it was only the quick moves of a
friend that saved him from becoming a burn casualty. His arms bear
rows of scars from self-inflicted knife wounds, each one
commemorating what Depp considers an important life event. “I
have,” he once explained, “a funny relationship
with my
body . .
. Ah, it sounds so stupid, but for me there shouldn’t be
any
halfway.”

He
has certainly been partying full tilt of late. The night after his
release from jail, Depp, flanked by leather-clad, heavily tattooed
bikers, was at Babyland, a Lower East Side bar filled with cribs and
nursery paraphernalia. Jerry Price, a Manhattan pipe fitter, claims
that Depp bumped into him at the club’s bar, after which
Price
says
he was pummeled by the biker bodyguards and hit with a rocking horse.
Attorney Breitbart denies Depp’s involvement, and Babyland
regulars
say it was Price who provoked the scuffle. Whatever the truth, the
skirmish didn’t dampen Depp’s spirit. The
next night he and the
bikers hit the downtown nightclubs again, landing at the Limelight
for a 3:30 a.m. pageant featuring drag queens, transvestites, and
transsexuals. And, at Dan Lynch, yet another hip watering hole, Depp
recently directed and starred in a video for Shane MacGowan and the
Popes. Their song? “That Woman’s Got Me
Drinking.”

The
woman who would seem to have Depp drinking these days is, of course,
the ultrathin Kate Moss, who has appeared topless alongside Marky
Mark in Calvin Klein ads. She and Depp met last February at the
Manhattan bistro Café Tabac, and Moss has said, “I
knew
from
the first moment we talked that we were going to be
together.”
And
they were: at the L.A. club Smash Place just weeks after they met,
when Depp previewed Banter, an eight-minute
antidrug movie he
made; vacationing on St. Bart’s a few weeks later; at
Manhattan’s
Fez club in April for a Johnny Cash concert. In July, after filming
wrapped on Don Juan, Depp flew to Paris to be with
Moss, who
was strolling the catwalk at the couture shows. She gave him a
ring-shaped platinum rattle filled with black pearls; he had already
given her a strand of diamonds. Depp is even having his Winona
Forever tattoo removed from his right bicep, a painful procedure that
he’s taking one letter at a time. At the moment it reads Wino
Forever.

Moss
and Depp, a friend says, “can’t keep their hands,
lips,
mouths,
legs off of each other.” Nor are they always successful in
keeping
their brawls private. In June they shouted at each other in the
dining room of Manhattan’s Royalton Hotel. Says a longtime
friend
of Depp’s: “Instead of hitting women, he just gets
angry
and lets
off steam in other ways.”

Depp
seems to be the kind of passionate fellow
who finds scant middle ground between picking someone up and
proposing. He
married Lori Allison, a
make-up artist from Florida,
when he was 20 and she was 25; they divorced two years later. He has
since been engaged at least three times—to actresses Sherilyn
Fenn,
Jennifer Grey, and Winona Ryder—and Tally Chanel, a B-movie
actress, also says she got a shot at being Depp’s
fiancée.
They met when she was working as a hostess at the Hollywood premiere
of Die Hard 2 in July 1990. “I helped him
out of his
limo,”
the 27-year-old recalls. “Our eyes locked, and he asked me to
marry
him.” They dated for a year, spending quiet nights at
Depp’s
Hollywood Hills home, ordering in food from a Chinese restaurant.

Depp
also said he that he “sort of had a crush,” on
Patty
Hearst, when
the two made Cry-Baby.
Then there was Faye Dunaway, with who Depp
shot the yet-to-be-released Arizona Dream.
“She’s
God in a
way,” he says. When he learned somehow, that Dunaway harbored
an
unfulfilled desire to bounce on a trampoline, he and a friend drove
80 miles to a sporting-goods store in Tucson to buy one, then brought
it back to the tiny town of Douglas, where they were filming.
“We
set the trampoline up in the middle of the desert,” he
recalls,
“and we got Faye on it, and in about half a second she turned
into
this sweet giddy 12-year-old girl on a trampoline. It was one of the
most incredible moments I’d ever seen in my life.”
Even on
the
night of his recent arrest, Depp seemed most concerned not with the
prospect of doing jail time but with the possibility that he had
fallen out of favor with a woman, Officer Eileen Perez. “I
don’t
think she likes me,” Perez heard Depp say to her partner.
Then he
brightened up and added, “But I bet if she saw me in a mall,
she’d
ask for my autograph.”

Depp’s
devotion to women starts with his mother, whose name Betty Sue, is
tattooed on his left bicep. Depp
recently bought her a $294,000,
three-bedroom home north of L.A., where the former waitress lives
with her second husband, Robert Palmer. “he’s just
the most
precious boy,” says Mrs. Palmer.

That
boy has certainly come a ways from Owensboro, Ky., where, the youngest
of four siblings, he was born to Betty Sue and his father, John, now
a city engineer living in Hallandale, Fla. When Depp was 7, his
family moved to Miramar, Fla., and lived in a motel for nearly a
year, until his father found a job. Johnny, meanwhile, started
smoking at 12, lost his virginity around age 13 and, he has said,
“did every kind of drug there was by 14.” At 16, a
year
after his
parents divorced, he dropped out of high school and joined a garage
band, the Kids. “Puberty was very vague,” he has
said.
“I
literally locked myself in a room and played guitar.”

Though
the Kids became successful enough to open for the Talking Heads and
the B-52’s, Depp lived for months in a friend’s ‘67
Chevy
Impala, supporting himself, he has said, by selling pens for a
telemarketing firm. In 1983 he and the Kids moved to L.A., and a year
later, after Nicolas Cage introduced Depp to his agent, the would-be
musician got his first movie role, in Nightmare on Elm Street,
where, in a bizarre dream sequence, he was swallowed by a bed. By
1985, the Kids had broken up and so had Depp’s marriage to
Allison.
His big break came in
1987: Cast
as a high school narc in the Fox
series 21 Jump Street, Depp was soon receiving
10,000 fan
letters a month and became a regular on the cover of Tiger
Beat.

Still,
Depp’s own heart throbbed only for Winona Ryder, whom he
first
spotted in June 1989 at the premiere of her movie Great Balls
of
Fire. “There’s been nothing in my 27
years that’s
comparable to the feeling I have with Winona,” Depp said.
Five
months after their first date, Depp gave Ryder an engagement ring;
three years later they broke up. The end of their romance left Depp
so desperately in love with Winona,” says a friend,
“that when
they
broke up, he wouldn’t admit it was over for the longest
time.”

Lately
he has focused those same intense affections on Moss—even
saying,
according to one friend, “that he wanted to have a baby with
Kate.”
One wonders if the two dream of a hotel room with a white picket
fence. Moss herself doesn’t have a permanent residence, and
since
Depp’s Hollywood home was destroyed in the January
earthquake, he
has lived a high-class vagabond life, staying mostly in hotels.
L.A.’s Chateau Marmont and Hollywood Roosevelt are two of his
current favorites.

Depp’s
real home, in a way, is the Viper Room. When he bought the club in
August 1993, along with two partners he envisioned a “cool
little
underground place,” he has said, where he and friends could
listen
to Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker over a first-rate
sound system. Instead
the club became the
hippest stop on the Sunset
Strip, with block-long lines of young Hollywood types and tourists who
want to see the place where River Phoenix, convulsing on the
sidewalk, spent the last moments of his life.

Are
Depp’s problems anywhere near as serious? His friends
don’t
think
so. “I am not worried at all,” says John Waters.
“Johnny is not
killing himself. I think he is aware of that pitfall. He has
certainly seen it.” What’s even more comforting to
Darlene
Cates
is that she has seen Depp marvel at the wonder of new life,
encountering her sleeping 3-month-old grandson during the Grape
shoot. “Johnny got down on his knees next to the
bed,” she
recalls, “and looking over at my grandson, his eyes just
softened.
He said, ‘Awesome, just totally awesome.’ Most men
don’t
realize what a miracle a baby is, but Johnny did.”